The next step is Microsoft maps in Google chase

San Francisco – Microsoft Corp. has improved its online mapping service that consists of three-dimensional protrusion of 15 U.S. cities to obtain an aerial view of their homes and neighborhoods. Later in months, Microsoft is expected to include more upcoming cities. A convenience that Google Earth doesn’t offer currently is the Virtual Earth Service which provides “Photorealistic” images, at Microsoft’s live.com site.

Big move by Google will be visible soon

Google has officially announced their idea to enhance product search in their web search engine before end of this year. This happened during professional eBay seller alliance summit in San Francisco last month. This is a big move by Google and very soon it will be visible, and will substantially improve its entire product searching experience (Froogle).

Google Acquires JotSpot Wiki Service

JotSpot is a wiki hosting company, which lets businesses or groups to create collaborative web sites without dealing directly with the actual hosting, programming, etc. This could be a nice fit for the growing Google Office which now consists of Docs and Spreadsheets.

Leave offline messages for Google Talk users

Google is coming up with the idea of releasing a new feature, which allows offline messages to be sent. Now when you send message to someone not signed in, an error is displayed “ is offline and can’t receive messages right now.” Where as after this idea is released the recipient will see missed message when they log back in.

Google shares ad wealth with videographers

Google has recently started to share advertising revenue with the maker of a popular video clip in an innovative deal, which could drive up the costs of competing in the hatchling video sharing sector. Now the search company has also agreed to turn over most advertising money generated by the latest video from Fritz Grobe and Stephen Volts, maker of “The Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment” said according to Peter Chane, a senior product manager for Google Video.

Other than that Metacafe, one of the top 10 Video-sharing sites, also announced that it would pay $5 to video maker for every 1,000 times video is watched.

Google comes up with Blog Alerts

Now google allows its user to set up alerts that can cover blogs specifically. User can select news, groups or other web alerts such as comprehensive which covers everything.

On the other hand, segmenting user’s sources for information could have some interesting uses – perhaps sending specific information appearing in an existing blog to a person and also the information appearing in Google Group to the other.

Google Announces Winner of Global Code Jam 2006

Petr Mitrichev of Russia was awarded as a first winner of Global Code Jam (GCJ) competition, announced today by Google Inc. He received a prize worth $10,000. Last year this award was won by Marek Cygan of Poland.

Second and third prize were won by Ying Wang a citizen of US and Andrey Stankevich respectively. Ying Wang received a cash of $5,000. This competition was purely based on the programming done with Java, C++, and c#, Python or VB.NET.

Google Earth now with space program

The launch of new images and features for Google Earth was lately a part of the festivities at the X Prize Cup held at Las Cruces, N.M. on October 20 to 21. Several historic and futuristic 3D space images from the Google Earth society were posted mainly for the X Prize Cup. Plus, the first same-day image of the area was then posted on Google Earth and a live Webcam of the festival was available.

This animation shows the Apollo 11 space capsule to track the moon. Apollo 11, of course, was the vehicle, which brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and home.

Launch of Google Politics

Last month, Google had announced that it will form a political action committee to act in the political kingdom on behalf of the company’s interests. The group, labeled NetPAC, is now starting to endorse candidates running for office in the coming November elections.

“We started this NetPAC in order to be able to sustain office-holders and candidates who are capable of sharing our vision of promoting and preserving the Internet as a free and also open platform for information, communication and innovation.” said by Ricardo Reyes, Google’s senior manager of global communication.

Google Launches Election Guide

Google on Monday launched an election guide, which provides information from all 435 congressional districts.

The content is accessible by clicking on the place mark for every district on the Google Earth, the search engine’s mapping service. The guide for the Nov. 7 elections is obtainable under the “layers” tab of the Google Earth sidebar. In addition, the guide also offers campaign finance information from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics.